This program attempts to expand the interaction between behavioral science and medicine beyond the traditional relationship with psychiatry. We propose to test the effectiveness of an inconspicuous, non-restraining device for training children with a serious orthopedic problem, scoliosis, to overcome it by learning to maintain a correct posture. We plan to continue investigating, in collaboration with the Goldwater Memorial Hospital, the apparently unusual ability of patients with severed spinal cords to learn to raise their blood pressure in order to correct serious postural hypotension. Experiments on rats will investigate rigorously the possible facilitation of cardiovascular learning by any release from homeostatic constraints that may be produced by spinal lesions or by denervating the carotid sinus and interrupting the nerves from the aortic arch. The latter rats and the spinal patients will be used also to test an hypothesis about how essential hypertension might be rewarded in aversive situations. Other work is aimed at discovering the behavioral variables that can produce more efficient visceral learning, maintaining rats paralyzed by curare in an optimum condition for discriminative classical conditioning of heart rate for a period of several days, and at using these optimum conditions to test rigorously for instrumental learning of visceral responses. Such completely immobilized but alert rats should be useful to eliminate a number of possible artifacts from experiments on learned visceral changes and also for a variety of other experiments using sophisticated neurophysiological techniques such as recording from single cells or fibers.